


until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world

by rudderless in an ocean of stars (ellieindelibly)



Series: until every fire is extinguished and every home is rebuilt [1]
Category: Batwoman (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Canon Continuation, Character Study, Gen, Introspection, POV Beth Kane, POV Kate Kane, Post 1x15: Off With Her Head, the kane family gets rid of a body
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-19
Updated: 2020-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:41:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23217937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellieindelibly/pseuds/rudderless%20in%20an%20ocean%20of%20stars
Summary: “Truth be told, there’s no real reason for them to be stumbling around in the woods at this hour, guided only by the pale glow of a slivered moon and the dim light of the phone clutched in her sister’s hand, all too easily swallowed up by the inky darkness filling the gaps between the trees. All that remains of August Cartwright fits neatly within the heavy-duty garbage bag that Alice now carries, five pounds of ashes and various bits of bone that she’d taken great care to secure every last piece of after the cremation process.Neither Kate nor Jacob had asked very many questions about how Alice had known how to operate a cremation chamber, or how she’d gotten such easy access to one in so little time. It might have been the shock curbing their tongues, but Alice suspects it may have also been just a touch of horror at how easily she‘d managed to come up with a plan to dispose of the body that had been lying on the floor of her sister’s bar a mere handful of hours ago.”//The one in which the Kane family buries a body together.A continuation of 1x15.
Relationships: Beth Kane | Alice & Kate Kane, Beth Kane | Alice & Kate Kane & Jacob Kane
Series: until every fire is extinguished and every home is rebuilt [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1732717
Comments: 6
Kudos: 45





	until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world

**Author's Note:**

> Enjoy. :)

Truth be told, there’s no real reason for them to be stumbling around in the woods at this hour, guided only by the pale glow of a slivered moon and the dim light of the phone clutched in her sister’s hand, all too easily swallowed up by the inky darkness filling the gaps between the trees. All that remains of August Cartwright fits neatly within the heavy-duty garbage bag that Alice now carries, five pounds of ashes and various bits of bone that she’d taken great care to secure every last piece of after the cremation process. 

Neither Kate nor Jacob had asked very many questions about how Alice had known how to operate a cremation chamber, or how she’d gotten such easy access to one in so little time. It might have been the shock curbing their tongues, but Alice suspects it may have also been just a touch of horror at how easily she’d managed to come up with a plan to dispose of the body that had been lying on the floor of her sister’s bar a mere handful of hours ago. 

Alice could have dumped Cartwright’s remains into the nearest storm drain and let the sewers have him, but the idea had sat like curdled milk in the bottom of her stomach and so here they are, traipsing deeper and deeper into the same woods that, a lifetime ago, had been featured heavily on the news. The same woods where half of the city had searched, in vain, in the hopes of finding little Beth Kane. It’s fitting, in a way, to dispose of the man who had stolen her here in this place where her friends and family had longed for her to be found. 

There is a part of her that needs it to happen like this, needs him to have as close to a proper burial as she can manage, needs him to have a grave for her to _see_ and _know_ that he is truly dead and buried. It is a part of her that has seldom been allowed to venture out of the hole she’d had no choice but to push her down into, _falling falling falling_ endlessly for eleven long years until the sight of a dead woman’s decapitated head in a freezer had been enough to break her fall and thaw her out. Alice hasn’t said this to either of her companions, but they both ventured out into the forest with her regardless, so she thinks they might understand. That, or they’re simply following the lead of the person who, between the three of them, has the most experience with murder. Either way, she gets what she wants, so she’s glad.

They take turns digging the hole, when Alice decides they’ve gone deep enough into the woods for it never to be found. Not that it matters- all usable DNA has been burned away by the fire, scorching anything that could reveal the identity of this pile of dirt to anyone who might stumble upon it anyway, and she’s sure that no one ever will. Alice is a meticulous creature, and without Batwoman trying to thwart her plans, well-

She’s never been one to fail at anything.

_If I walked around failing at a third of everything I did, I’d still be locked in a cell on a diet of my own fingernails._

Now Batwoman is one of her partners in crime, at least for tonight. She’d laugh over the irony of it all if it weren’t for the fact that she still feels like she might choke on the echo of the fear toxin she’d breathed so much of into her lungs, into her blood, into the very marrow of her bones. 

The thought makes her shudder, just a little, as she watches her father take his turn with the shovel. She feels her knees go weak and moves to lean against the nearest tree to keep from crumpling down to the ground. With his back to her, he doesn’t catch sight of her slip, a despicable display of weakness, but Kate does. Kate always manages to see her at her most vulnerable. It irks her.

All these years spent building walls and Kate can reach out to poke at the very heart of her with seemingly no effort at all.

“What’s wrong?” Kate says, sounding like she might actually care. “Are you still sick from the toxin? Was the adrenaline shot not effective enough?”

“It’s nothing,” Alice bites out, scowling down at her boots. She gives the bag containing Cartwright’s remains a half-hearted nudge with her toe. “Keep your voice down.”

After a moment, Alice tilts her head back until she feels the bark of the tree against her hair, tugging at the strands as she moves. She closes her eyes and resolves to ignore her sister if she tries to force a real answer from her throat. But Kate remains silent, and a curious mixture of disappointment and relief wells up in the hollow of her chest.

It doesn’t take long for the hole to be deep enough for its purpose. Alice dumps the contents of the bag into it without ceremony, careful to keep her face utterly expressionless, while Kate and their father stand off to the side. They fill the hole again in silence, and she is the last to take a turn. 

Alice pounds the freshly turned dirt flat with the back of the shovel, and it feels like a door has been closed somehow, and for once she is not on the wrong side of it. But there is still no sense of relief, no peace, no quiet and undeniable certainty that this man will never again haunt her dreams. 

There is only the ever-familiar darkness, and she has no choice but to lean into its adamantine embrace. 

She closes her eyes and lets herself stand there for a long moment, the night air cool and sweet against her fevered skin. She feels like she might stand there for eternity, half-tethered to the ground and half-floating up and away from the world, until a firm hand settles on her shoulder and she’s back in her body, painfully real and hopelessly frail.

* * *

It’s the look on Alice’s face that unsettles her, makes Kate step forward to place one hand on her shoulder and use the other to pull the shovel’s handle out of her grasp with surprising ease. A look like she might crumble away into nothing in an instant, a look of such complete and utter emptiness that Kate is almost afraid to touch her for fear of being greeted by a gaze so hollow that her sister might as well be a dead woman walking. 

Alice opens her eyes at the touch and the sheer desolation in them is a devastatingly terrible thing to behold.

“Alice,” Kate starts, then just as suddenly stops because she has no idea what to say here, now, standing over the grave of the man who stole her sister, the man she killed, the man whose death weighs around her neck like a noose as she stands on a chair about to be kicked out from under her feet.

For a brief second, the empty look on Alice’s face gives way to raw and open honesty, like someone has taken a hammer to the shell of her myriad masks to reveal a seed of truth within.

“I thought I would feel different.” Her voice is soft, quiet in the way that Beth used to whisper secrets to her as children, on the nights when they’d share the same bed in the same room and sneak a flashlight under the covers to chase away the dark.

Kate remembers then, the words that have been haunting her for hours. 

_She wanted you to hear her story, and get you to kill me. She wanted to break you too._

Kate hates herself for it, but before her sister can recover, before she can raise her guard and shut her out once more, she asks the question that has been burning a hole in the back of her throat since she looked up to see Alice trailing their father into the bar.

“Did you want me to kill him? Was that part of your plan?”

Vaguely, she realizes that their father is watching them from a distance, a silent spectator. He doesn’t quite know how to function right now either, she thinks, standing in the woods with a pair of murderers for daughters, helping them get rid of the remains of a man who he’d nearly killed himself. 

Somehow, Alice goes even paler at this, her already ashen face turning ghostly, bloodless. Almost as lifeless as she’d looked in the clinic, drawing her last breaths in the circle of Kate’s arms. 

“ _Want?_ ” She breathes, and the air is so cold that the word turns into a puff of mist as it leaves her lips. “Of course I wanted him dead. And I wanted you to hear it from him, what he did to me, to her. But I never thought you’d actually do it. I thought I’d have to find a way to kill him myself, even after you learned the truth about our- about _her_.”

Her expression hardens, then, and the look that Alice levels towards Kate cuts like one of her knives. Kate has her answer, and it is one that rings of truth, but it has not come without cost. Alice will not be caught with her defenses down again any time soon. Not after Kate chose to press her advantage during such a moment of rare and uncharacteristic vulnerability, something she suspects is not only the result of Cartwright’s death but whatever else had happened to Alice while she was in the grasp of her deepest fears.

Alice spins on her heel and stomps off towards their father, leaving Kate to follow them out of the woods and back to the car waiting half a mile up the road, hidden in a thicket of trees, with the shovel they used to dig a dead man’s grave held firmly in her hands.

**Author's Note:**

> Leave a review, pour a drink any and all of the Hamilton-Kanes.
> 
> Depending on how the rest of the season goes, I might either continue this by making it the first part of a series, or leave it alone as a oneshot. 
> 
> feel free to yell at me on tumblr: @rudderless-in-an-ocean-of-stars or check out my instagram: @lavender.beth where i post batwoman memes and edits :)


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